Reinventing the IT function: the Role of IT Agility and IT Ambidexterity in Supporting Digital Business Transformation

The immanent opportunities and threats from digital business transformation significantly affect the role of the IT function. Line functions increasingly expect that the internal IT function provides support for digital value creation in addition to traditional IT services. This dual focus bears the potential for tensions as competing in digital business environments means to act fast and to explore, while managing traditional enterprise IT requires stability, reliability, and exploitation of existing resources. Therefore, our study empirically examines the role of two key capabilities—IT agility and IT ambidexterity—on the IT function’s digitization support. Based on a survey including 258 IT executives, we find that IT agility is a main driver of the IT function’s ability to support digitization. Furthermore, our results show that an ambidextrous focus of IT functions is best suited to find a balance between opposing demands.